Stalin planned a five-year economic plan called collectivization and believed that under that plan, the USSR would industrialize, and become stronger than any nation in the West. Unfortunately, the USSR was made up mostly of poor peasants. Mostly, these peasants harvested crops using their hands and wooden plows. Therefore, to make the plan successful, he had to brings some changes in peasant way of harvesting crops and their lives. Stalin required two things from peasants: firstly, the peasants would have to pay heavy taxes to pay for his new factories and secondly, the peasants would have to produce more food for all of the new workers in the cities.…
The book opens with the Ukrainian famine which resulted in 3.3 million deaths (Snyder, 411). Snyder presents the reasoning behind the man made famine was a punishment of failed collectivization (Snyder, 33 42-44, 411). He next moves on to the deliberate…
Weissman seems to accord with Hutchinson as he states “Again, as in 1891, the peasant was helpless against the onslaught of famine, partly because of government policy”, this shows the initial cause of the famine was due to government policies implemented by Lenin which had requisitioned supplies from the peasantry in 1918. As a result peasants refused to grow crops and the little food they did have was confiscated and taken away. This shows how oblivious the government under Lenin was to the plight of the peasantry. Arguably the famine of 1921 was not due to a conscious decision that the peasants should starve. Yet to attribute it simply to drought would be untrue, the weather though bad was not at disastrous level, Conquest claims “the factor which turned the scale was, in fact, the Soviet Government’s methods of crop requisitioning”.…
The Soviet population proved its resiliency by foraging nuts and edible grasses because they had become accustomed to literally living off the land like animals (p. 225). However, this supplementation was not sustaining for wartimes. The Soviet government needed to find a way to keep its people from starving. This meant Stalin would have to reach out for American aid via lend-lease. Without the determination of the Soviet people and Stalin’s willingness to ask for aid, the Soviet Union’s population would have famished and deteriorated.…
Over the 30 years of Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship, the estimated death toll ranged from 28 to 40 million people, whom died from a variety of things, such as famine, executions, and a very large war. Stalin assumed autocratic rule of the Soviet Union in 1924 following the death of Lenin. Stalin made a variety of reforms, but his main focus was on the economic issues that was occurring in the communist country at the time. Stalin made his economic reforms solely to make the most amount of money possibly, even if millions of people had to die. I completely contest to Stalin’s beliefs and ideas during this very controversial time in the USSR.…
The impacts of the physical abuse, early political involvement, and school boycotts on Stalin both physically and mentally can be seen as shaping his political…
Stalin, also known as the man of steel, was known as a god among his people and still can remembered as one today. However, were his views on the world and racial profiling correct? Think about it, Stalin killed well over 53 million based on religion, race, and stupidity. Many would argue that Stalin was an evil man, but I disagree. Stalin stepped up to the plate to what he had to.…
1.The Great Famine was mainly caused by severe weather. There were an unusual number of storms, which ruined crops people largely depended on, like wheat, oat, and hay crops. Food was scarce, and a price inflation ensued. The Great Famine profoundly impacted medieval society because it resulted in a higher mortality rate, higher crime rate, and less productivity from the laborers due to insufficient nutritions. Additionally, villages were abandoned and there was an increase in vagabonds, or homeless people.…
Stalin was so fixated on staying ahead of America at this point that he never thought of his own people. He used the money that the people made and used it for the nuclear race and the space race. He probably put so much money into going against America that it could have been used to help his own people. Instead, he watched them die of starvation, or an…
3. Explain in detail the different aspects of totalitarianism and describe how Stalin employed these policies and tactics to extend and maintain absolute control over Russian society. (Beck, Section 2) A totalitarian government is one that takes complete control over every aspect of a nation, including both the public and private lives of its citizens.…
As is required by the nature of a communist government, there was no personal property and the means of production were nationalized. There was no capitalist competition that kept food production steady, thus Soviet Russia became infamous for housing many famines and hunger stricken people. This enormous problem was made an allusion to in an exchange with Arnoldovich and Philipovich over food, where Philipovich reveals that he conducted a study and concluded that people who merely read the communist newspapers would already be overtaken by hunger. By creating this situation in the novel, Bulgakov again exhibits his criticism on the communist movement through Philipovich. The author even goes as far as to indicate that no change is better than the communist reform, which is a reasonable argument in light of the hunger issue that was only worsened by the soviet regime.…
Q1. New Economic Policy: Leonid Brezhnev During the 1920’s, Vladimir Lenin was in charge of what he had recently renamed, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). This was a time of distress for the people of the USSR. Famine had struck and the majority of the population was starving in many cases it even led to death.…
Norman Naimark argues in Stalin’s Genocides that the dekulakization, the Holodomor, attacks on enemy nationalities, and the purges of 1937-38 purges should all be classified as the “crime of crimes”: genocide. Currently the four events are simply viewed as massacres or mass killings of a gargantuan scale. He goes further to assert that it was Stalin alone who facilitated and enabled these genocides to occur. By reclassifying them as genocide, Naimark hopes that Stalin’s crimes will finally get the recognition and proper classification that they deserve. The text focuses on these four key examples to prove this point, however, Naimark also insists that the four cases should be seen collectively as one interrelated genocide under the reign of…
In a person is an individualist, he or she will put their needs over the groups. Individualists tend to distance themselves from other people and usually keeps their emotions to themselves. On the other hand, collectivists put the groups problems over their personal problems. The collectivists must sacrifice their rights for the groups greater good. Animal Farm is a story by George Orwell that symbolizes the Soviet Union in the 1900s.…
The 18th century marked the demolition of the Mughal sphere of influence and the rise of the British East India Company. By expanding its trade enterprise into the Indian subcontinent, The Company, hoped to both fund the administrative costs of its day-to-day operations and generate sizeable profits (John 21). After some initial difficulty, the Mughal emperor, Jahangir, allowed the Company to trade in 1612. Two decades after this agreement, the first trading port was established in Bengal. As the Mughal empire suffered through war, the depletion of resources, and declining health, the Company was able to gain an upper hand over local leadership; it did so by incurring the medical costs of the imperial family.…